Agents of S.H.I.E.LD is terrific – watch it while Simon Cowell licks his eyeballs

NO one calls themselves a telly addict any more. Time was, that was a thing. In the ‘80s being yoked to the idiot box was a bad thing. But today? We covet screens endlessly. We carry them around with us all the time. Right now I have two monitors in front of me, a MacBook Air demanding my attention, a Google Nexus 7 chirping away to itself and a smartphone gone the way of a black mirror, its battery worn down by incessant fiddling. The screens are everywhere now. We don’t notice them because they surround us.

And I love it. My name is Mic Wright and I am an addict. I am unrepentant. I was born to be a telly critic but sadly telly isn’t what it used to be. When Clive James – the greatest TV reviewer of all time – was stalking the Palaeolithic expanses of the small screen, a world where Channel 4 was just a glimmer in some priapic executives hungry eye, television meant something. It had Play For Today and hard hitting documentaries. World In Action, Death on the Rock, truly panoramic Panorama. It had drunks and eccentrics. It had George Best, Muhammad Ali, Greta Garbo and Helen Mirren on Parkinson. It had The Tube and TOTP. It had surprises.

Now? Now it’s multi-channel, multi-platform pap chewed up and spat at us by people who think we’re too thick to have an attention span. Hollyoaks now in series 700000000 relies on rape to spice up storylines and, this week, is going to blow some characters up to wake us from our stupor. Downton Abbey is practically a war crime. Julian Fellows flaunts his hard-on for the real aristocracy while pretending life downstairs was all bonnets and bloody good chaps. Last week’s brutal rape was slipped into the storyline like a lost dog or a missing pocket watch. Nothing indicates a terrible scriptwriter more than when a man uses a character’s vagina to fill the space where the plot should be.

What do I like? Things that will probably drive you mad with me. I love the X Factor. It fits into the fine heritage of Opportunity Knocks and New Faces. It is not about music but entertainment. Dermot O’Leary is a consummate pro. Louis Walsh could be replaced with a foolish animatronic Irish rabbit called Bucky O’Hearbesumgold. Sharon Osborne is on face v.10.3. No one really knows what Nicole Scherzinger is for. Not even her family. It’s all ruled over by Simon Cowell, a man so clumsily Machiavellian it reveals just how lazy tabloid journalists really are. In short, our winters are better for the X Factor feeding us something that doesn’t matter to care about too much.

The other show that has hooked me like a reckless trawler passing a family beach? Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. Joss Whedon is a genius at telly. The pilot episode had more good lines than entire seasons of other shows manage. The critics who don’t like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D shouldn’t be watching telly. They should gouge out their eyeballs with spoons and go wandering in the desert, never to bother us again. AoS is fun. Really fun. Stupendously fun. That’s what it’s for and that’s what it does. Hopefully, that’s what this column will be too.

This is Mic’s first of many columns for Anorak:

Mic Wright is a writer. He grew up in Norfolk but doesn’t have webbed feet. He mainly writes about technology and pop culture but will write about almost anything for money. He has previously written for Stuff, Q, The Times, T3, the Evening Standard and…um…Pensions World magazine. He is Chief Technology Blogger for The Daily Telegraph. He can be found fighting, making jokes and generally messing about on Twitter as @brokenbottleboy.